Mykolo Romerio universitetas / Mykolas Romeris University

As life expectancy increases, societies need to implement strategies that support healthy ageing in place. Community mobility is a vital part of this, as older adults need access to healthcare, shops, and local amenities to maintain their health, independence, and social engagement. Aim: The COST Action BOPALIM (Building Opportunities for Participation and Accessibility through Lifelong Community Mobility) aims to create a framework to guide European and country-specific efforts related to the provision of accessible and user-friendly transport options for older adults. Method: Subtask 3.3 has collected case studies from COST Action members regarding appropriate and affordable public transport solutions under the umbrella of community mobility. These case studies were synthesised to create 5–10 vignettes, combining narrative and thematic approaches. Preliminary findings: The collected case studies address themes related to the usability, safety, and accessibility of public transport. They also explore how technological advancements can function either as additional barriers or as practical solutions for participation, often embedded within broader political issues such as cost and environmental concerns. These findings are consistent with the literature review but add a more nuanced understanding of contextual factors and personal experiences of mobility issues of older adults in Europe and beyond.

This book examines how verbal and symbolic aggression and hostility directed at women and LGBT+ people operate across linguistic, multimodal, legal, and institutional domains, and how these practices contribute to discursive, democratic, and constitutional erosion. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from linguistics, discourse and media studies, gender and queer theory, constitutional law, and human-rights scholarship, the volume addresses forms of aggression and hostility ranging from insults, ridicule, and digitally mediated shaming to metaphors of contamination, symbolic erasure, administrative practices, and doctrinal silence. Through comparative analyses of cases from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, China, and the European human rights system, the chapters show how these practices shape political communication, institutional behavior, and legal meaning-making, thereby affecting visibility, dignity, participation, and the practical enjoyment of rights. The volume highlights recurring mechanisms, such as purity and protection narratives, victim-perpetrator inversion, and multimodal amplification, that travel across platforms, political systems, and institutional settings. The book demonstrates how verbal and symbolic aggression functions not only as an isolated speech act but as a cross-contextual mechanism with cumulative democratic and constitutional effects. The volume will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in law, linguistics, media and communication studies, gender studies, political science, and human rights.

This Introduction sets out the motivation, conceptual framework, and research context for Law, Linguistics and the Far Right: International Perspectives on Verbal Attacks on Vulnerable Groups. It frames the volume’s guiding question: how digitally and institutionally mediated impoliteness and related forms of verbal and symbolic hostility contribute to the erosion of discursive, democratic, and constitutional norms, and how they shape the visibility, dignity, and rights of women and LGBT+ people. Bringing the chapters into dialogue across linguistics, media and platform studies, gender and queer theory, and constitutional and human rights law, it identifies the volume’s cross-cutting mechanisms and synthesizes the shared lessons that emerge across cases from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, China, and European human rights law. The Introduction closes by outlining directions for further research and providing a roadmap of the chapters.

Online verbal attacks against a particular group have become a prominent feature of authoritarian and populist political discourse. In this chapter, we offer a fresh look at how creating deep disagreements and employing the language of conflict can work as strategies to gradually erode democracy and rights in the name of a fictional majority. We argue that the models of linguistic impoliteness can offer a valuable and comprehensive perspective for describing and understanding the phenomena of online misogyny, sexism, transphobia, and the attacks on the judiciary system, as well as their repercussions for plurality and the integrity of democracy. This theoretical framework for investigating the digitally mediated far-right discourse context of the rights of women and the rights of LGBT+ people is best supported by case study analysis combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative methodology is based on the use of Google Developer’s API and corpora tools concerning selected social media platforms, a topic we explain in the following Chapter 2. Through the lens of the models of linguistic impoliteness, i.e., adopting the expressions “impolite language”, “shameless normalization of impoliteness” and “shamelessness”, we make the case that the blurred distinction in the threshold of acceptability of verbal aggression suggests the enthroning of a “new online discursive trend”. We test this assumption in Chapter 3.

This chapter outlines the methodology employed to collect and analyze data within the theoretical framework established in Chapter 1. It argues that the chosen approach is both suitable and adequate for investigating verbal impoliteness on social media and can serve as a model for future research in linguistics, human rights, and digital media studies. We describe in detail the procedures used to compile the Corpus of Digital Impoliteness (CID – Corpus de Impolidez Digital), an open-access dataset designed to support further research in this field. To demonstrate the relevance and adequacy of this methodology, we explain our rationale for selecting Brazilian Congresswomen Sâmia Bomfim and Erika Hilton, along with Federal Supreme Court Justice Cármen Lúcia, as focal subjects. Their inclusion reflects both their institutional roles and the surge of online verbal attacks following viral videos targeting them on Brazilian social media. The chapter also details the criteria guiding the selection of specific platforms – X/Twitter and YouTube – and discusses their significance in ensuring the representativeness of the dataset. Finally, it presents the initial quantitative results that form the empirical basis for the findings elaborated in Chapter 3.

This chapter draws on models of linguistic impoliteness to examine how online verbal attacks relate to the discursive conditions of democracy. Building on the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 1 and the methodological approach detailed in Chapter 2, this chapter presents the findings of a multi-case study centered on Congresswomen Sâmia Bomfim and Erika Hilton and Supreme Federal Court (STF) Judge Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha. These women have been recurrent targets of social media hostility, including insults and insinuations often focused on their physical appearance and gender identity. The analysis addresses a common research question across all cases: how do online verbal attacks on women and LGBT+ public figures shape the democratic and human rights environment in Brazil? We hypothesize that such attacks contribute to the discursive erosion of democracy, which thereby undermines equality, dignity, and individuals’ capacity to participate on equal footing in public debate. Our findings show that linguistic impoliteness is primarily enacted through insults, sarcasm, and playful provocation, intensified by the affordances of digital platforms. These patterns reflect discursive dynamics associated with misogyny, sexism, and transphobia. The analysis also highlights the role of challenging questions in generating conflictual interactions that provoke, threaten, and degrade perceived opponents, and in reinforcing “us versus them” dynamics that fuel polarization. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that hostile discourse targeting these public figures contributes to the erosion of deliberative norms, the undermining of individual rights, and the weakening of democratic discourse by narrowing conditions of inclusion and recognition, distorting deliberative equality, and compromising equality, dignity, and the right to gender expression.

The concept of co-governance is understood as a way to build trust in government and to increase public involvement. It should lead to improvements of public services and solve wicked problems related to service provision. However, the idea of co-governance itself requires the sharing and devolution of decisionmaking power, which becomes challenging in relation to the public sector's role, their willingness to retain control, and at the same time – seeking to engage citizens. Although the aim of national strategies in Lithuania is to involve NGOs more actively in service provision, this can be challenging given the diverse characteristics, capacities, and expectations of stakeholders. Furthermore, municipalities are responsible for ensuring the provision of social services and are under pressure to guarantee their availability and quality. The case study of Marijampolė municipality was chosen as an example for analysis because it has one of the highest demands for social services in Lithuania and experience of transferring service provision to NGOs. In this context, this study aims to analyse the shifting boundary between the state and civil society in the context of public service provision. To achieve this aim, the following tasks have been set: 1. Examine the theoretical assumptions and changes in cooperation between the public sector and NGOs. 2. Identify the current cooperation between NGOs and the Marijampolė municipality in the field of service provision. 3. Provide scientific insights into the conditions necessary for co-governance of social services. The case study was conducted in several stages. First, the scientific literature, legal acts and other documents related to the research problem were analysed. Then, a qualitative study was conducted, including interviews and focus groups with representatives of the Marijampolė municipality and NGOs.

Liepos pirmą sekmadienį Lietuvoje minima Globėjų diena. Tai – proga giliau pažvelgti į vaikų globos temą. Šia tema svarbu kalbėti ne vieną dieną per metus. Šioje „Mokslo minklių“ tinklalaidėje MRU Edukologijos krypties socialinių mokslų daktarė Dovilė Lisauskienė dalinasi apie vaikus, kurių gyvenimo pradžia buvo sudėtingesnė nei daugelio: vaikus, netekusius tėvų globos. Apie juos visuomenėje vis dar sklando daug įsivaizdavimų. Dažnai girdime: „jie turi elgesio problemų“, „jiems trūksta socialinių įgūdžių“. Tačiau ką iš tikrųjų matome ir ko nepastebime? Apie tai, kas lieka už elgesio etikečių: nutrūkusius ryšius, antrines traumas, globėjų patiriamą emocinį krūvį. Ir apie tai, kas dažnai nustebina – vaikų gebėjimą neprarasti vilties. Kviečiame klausytis ir tęsti diskusijas šia tema.